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Oct. 27th, 2008 10:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vr_trakowskiIt occurred to me recently that, should I live out my expected span, I will probably be the last person to remember my paternal grandfather.
He died when I was just short of eight; for decades I thought it was a year later, but when we visited the cemetery in August I saw I'd been off by a a year all this time. I remember him, though, tall and gray and a bit scary, very quiet--very loving. He used to leave Hershey's Kisses on the back room piano for us every day when we visited, and he was so deadpan about it that I didn't quite believe it was him until I actually saw him do it.
He was 67 when he died; I remember him as elderly, and in truth he was, a child of the Depression worn out by a lifetime of hard physical work and decades of smoking. Grams never remarried--and she had offers--and she waited almost thirty years to join him again.
But I am probably the youngest person to remember him clearly. My brother, who is four years younger, doesn't. I'm not sure he has any memories of Gramps at all. There are possibly some relations my age who do recall him--I have more relatives on that side than I'll ever be able to remember--but I don't know. I should ask Dad, I suppose.
So the odds are that when I die, there will be no one left who remembers him, and shortly thereafter his memory will be shrunk to old government records and the occasional family tree. He'll be a name--maybe a photo here and there--but no more than a hypothetical person.
Of course, this is true for everyone, eventually, and it's not really a sad thing. The dead must make way for the living, that's how it works. I just find it significant, personally, that I may well be the last bastion of memory in this particular case.
He died when I was just short of eight; for decades I thought it was a year later, but when we visited the cemetery in August I saw I'd been off by a a year all this time. I remember him, though, tall and gray and a bit scary, very quiet--very loving. He used to leave Hershey's Kisses on the back room piano for us every day when we visited, and he was so deadpan about it that I didn't quite believe it was him until I actually saw him do it.
He was 67 when he died; I remember him as elderly, and in truth he was, a child of the Depression worn out by a lifetime of hard physical work and decades of smoking. Grams never remarried--and she had offers--and she waited almost thirty years to join him again.
But I am probably the youngest person to remember him clearly. My brother, who is four years younger, doesn't. I'm not sure he has any memories of Gramps at all. There are possibly some relations my age who do recall him--I have more relatives on that side than I'll ever be able to remember--but I don't know. I should ask Dad, I suppose.
So the odds are that when I die, there will be no one left who remembers him, and shortly thereafter his memory will be shrunk to old government records and the occasional family tree. He'll be a name--maybe a photo here and there--but no more than a hypothetical person.
Of course, this is true for everyone, eventually, and it's not really a sad thing. The dead must make way for the living, that's how it works. I just find it significant, personally, that I may well be the last bastion of memory in this particular case.